Arguments

an optional character string to separate the results. Not
NA_character_.

Details

paste converts its arguments (viaas.character) to character strings, and concatenates
them (separating them by the string given by sep). If the
arguments are vectors, they are concatenated term-by-term to give a
character vector result. Vector arguments are recycled as needed,
with zero-length arguments being recycled to "".

Note that paste() coerces NA_character_, the
character missing value, to "NA" which may seem
undesirable, e.g., when pasting two character vectors, or very
desirable, e.g. in paste("the value of p is ", p).

If a value is specified for collapse, the values in the result
are then concatenated into a single string, with the elements being
separated by the value of collapse.

Value

A character vector of the concatenated values. This will be of length
zero if all the objects are, unless collapse is non-NULL in
which case it is a single empty string.

If any input into an element of the result is in UTF-8 (and none are
declared with encoding "bytes", (see Encoding),
that element will be in UTF-8, otherwise in the current encoding in
which case the encoding of the element is declared if the current
locale is either Latin-1 or UTF-8, at least one of the corresponding
inputs (including separators) had a declared encoding and all inputs
were either ASCII or declared.

If an input into an element is declared with encoding "bytes",
no translation will be done of any of the elements and the resulting
element will have encoding "bytes". If collapse is
non-NULL, this applies also to the second, collapsing, phase, but some
translation may have been done in pasting object together in the first
phase.

Examples

## When passing a single vector, paste0 and paste work like as.character.
paste0(1:12)
paste(1:12) # same
as.character(1:12) # same
## If you pass several vectors to paste0, they are concatenated in a
## vectorized way.
(nth <- paste0(1:12, c("st", "nd", "rd", rep("th", 9))))
## paste works the same, but separates each input with a space.
## Notice that the recycling rules make every input as long as the longest input.
paste(month.abb, "is the", nth, "month of the year.")
paste(month.abb, letters)
## You can change the separator by passing a sep argument
## which can be multiple characters.
paste(month.abb, "is the", nth, "month of the year.", sep = "_*_")
## To collapse the output into a single string, pass a collapse argument.
paste0(nth, collapse = ", ")
## For inputs of length 1, use the sep argument rather than collapse
paste("1st", "2nd", "3rd", collapse = ", ") # probably not what you wanted
paste("1st", "2nd", "3rd", sep = ", ")
## You can combine the sep and collapse arguments together.
paste(month.abb, nth, sep = ": ", collapse = "; ")
## Using paste() in combination with strwrap() can be useful
## for dealing with long strings.
(title <- paste(strwrap(
"Stopping distance of cars (ft) vs. speed (mph) from Ezekiel (1930)",
width = 30), collapse = "\n"))
plot(dist ~ speed, cars, main = title)